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Plastic Bertrand

I had Plastic Bertrand going through my head all day yesterday, Someone said it was his birthday (I was never quite sure that there actually was a Plastic Bertrand…I thought it was Lou Deprijk) and shared a video which I watched nostalgically. Bad mistake. All day long I had Plastic Bertrand going through my head. Which is harmless enough–It could have been Bohemian Rhapsody or Free Bird or I Know What Boys Like–except that I would find myself saying aloud (in a French monotone) Ca Plane Pour Moi moi moi moi moi, Ca Plane Pour Moi. If I didn’t catch myself I’d do a couple choruses. This went on for hours. I ignored it. Last night I’d put on Joe Henderson’s Inner Urge. The title cut is one of my favorite jazz tunes ever. I can’t really express what it means to me, it’s beyond words. The lights were out and I sat in the dark and Joe was blowing and blowing and the tempo was crazy and McCoy Tyner’s left hand came down in crazy comps and Elvin Jones drop kicked and danced across the cymbals. Each soloed. Bob Cranshaw’s turn came and the bass was down, solid, grooving. Then expressive. Exploring. The music grew hushed. The room was silent. I closed my eyes and laid back awaiting Joe’s tenor return. It’s one of those jazz moments where space and silence means so much. It was just perfect. Everything silent except for the bass. And in that absolute quiet, that zen perfection, I heard another sound. It was a voice, my own voice. “Ca Plane Pour Moi” I sang, “Ca Plane Pour Moi moi moi moi moi….”

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My latest writing at: Brick Wahl

The good news, my doctor told me, peering over my xrays, is that my hips are in good shape, sparing me the embarrassment of having oldpeopleitis. Bad news is my lower back is an arthritic mess, a result of decades of heavy lifting gnarly dudeness, four decades almost of seizure meds, once being the only […]

My new and excruciatingly dull mellow epileptic lifestyle is so teutonically ordered that the creative Irish half is getting surly and bored and would really love some whiskey. Es tut mir leid Nelligan, that’s not in the budget this month. Nelligan loathes Herr Wahl and his perfect budget and organization and bill paying. Hates all […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Politics

Ghosting. ‪A millennial thing that boomers and GenXers are so appalled by. Take this job and shove it. We’ve all sung that quietly to ourselves at some shit job. But that’s all we ever did, sing it to ourselves. Some millennials just have the nerve to actually do it. After all, corporations have been doing […]

Thrilled to see we won the House in a blue wave, despite James Carville. Did better than I thought in Senate, and way better with governors. Can’t wait to see state house results. I thought Nelson would and Gillum might win, sad, thought Kemp’s suppression would work, it did (decisively), and thought Beto would lose […]

My latest writing at: Brick's History

As 19th century oratory, the Gettysburg Address was a failure. Lincoln himself said so as the weak and scattered applause subsided. But when printed on the front page of papers all across the North, it was a gem. Perfect. Poetic. Memorized and recited by everyone from politicians to preachers to schoolchildren to soldiers. It still […]

(March 5th, 2017) Stalin died on this day in 1953. It was a peaceful passing, in his own bed. His corpse was embalmed and treated and put on display next to Lenin’s, and the people passed by in their hundreds of thousands, never realizing till then just what a little guy–five foot four inches–Stalin had […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Science

Turns out that the word helicopter is made from the the classic Greek stems helico, meaning spiral, and pter, meaning winged, as in pterodactyl or pterosaur or pterpaulanmerisaur. Which means that helicopter should be pronounced helicoter, long o, silent p, which will make you even more irritating to your friends. Try it next time one […]

I suspect that most verbs began as nouns verbed and an ungodly number of nouns were once verbs nouned and not once but sometimes many times this renouning and reverbing takes place, leaving dictionaries a record of wanton anarchy and the decline of values over and over again.

My latest writing at : Brick's Brain

So I just spazzsplained a memory lapse to someone. It was a long windy paragraph and she listened, too polite to interrupt. I finished and there was a long second, then another, even longer, and then she asked if I meant that it was on the tip of her tongue? Um, yeah, I said, that’s […]

Sometimes when I try to say pharmacy I stutter. If I say farm I don’t stutter. My wife asks if I can say pharmacy if it’s spelled with an F. Farmacy I say. And if it’s spelled with a Ph? I stammered. So you don’t have a problem if it’s misspelled with an F? Apparently […]